In 2011, Amazon had 30,000 full-time employees in the United States. By the end of 2016, it employed more than 180,000: a sixfold increase in just five years. In January, Amazon announced plans to expand its US payroll by another 100,000 jobs -- "full-time, full-benefit," it emphasized -- over the next 18 months. Worldwide, Amazon now employs more than 380,000 people, and in the first half of 2017, it hired another 41,000.

The latest Fortune 500 rankings put Amazon among the nation's Top 10 employers, just ahead of FedEx and UPS and not far behind McDonald's. If, as planned, it hires another 100,000 employees over the next year, it may soon be the second-largest corporate employer in America. (Walmart, with 2.3 million employees, holds the No. 1 rank by a wide margin.)

Characteristically, Trump has personalized his rancor for Amazon. "Believe me," he said of Bezos and Amazon during the 2016 campaign, "if I become president, oh, do they have problems. They're gonna have such problems."''... Considering Trump's repeated declarations that he would be the greatest jobs president "that God ever created," his disdain for Amazon is irrational. Doubly so, given his much-ballyhooed admiration for winners.

Bezos is both vastly richer than Trump, and a true innovator (by contrast, Trump seems to have thrived off of a combination of his in-born wealth, and hanging onto it with an iron grip through multiple bankruptcies, thanks to his crack-team of lawyers and accountants, and a few genuinely wealthy friends who threw him lifelines...) This clearly gets Trump's goat to no end. But though Amazon probably destroys jobs on balance, it is indisputably due to creating huge overall efficiencies.
Trump capitalizes, as he always does, on the ill will of the losers of this process -- and he's both too venal and too dumb to realize there is greater opportunity in highlighting, and at least attempting to solve, the economy's sluggish inability to create more jobs to replace the destroyed ones...